Shot outdoors on a very sunny afternoon from about 15:15 to 16:30.
The Sony app and Open Camera app are installed on the same Xperia phone, capable of 19MP (but set to 12MP for this comparison). Note that a high megapixel count doesn’t necessarily translate into better quality photos.
The images from the Xperia apps required some slight PNG compression to get around Discourse’s size limitations. Only one of the Millipixels photos is compressed (noted). EDIT: After conversion to montage, no compression needed.
Non-trivial amount of human error/inaccuracy! (Can’t blame it on the rain that wasn’t falling (first earworm)- just the intense reflected light and my bad vision.
Device/app Settings Sony Xperia Camera/Sony app
Dialed down to 12MP
Full Automatic
Sony Xperia Camera/Open Camera app
Dialed down to 12MP
Full Automatic
Sony | Millipixels | Open Camera:
Millipixels - Due to the bright light and very reflective leaves, it was incredibly difficult to see and evaluate settings during the capture.
Sony | Millipixels | Open Camera:
Millipixels - The glare off the water when shooting into the sun rendered the viewfinder and settings nearly impossible for me to see or fine tune.
Third earworm: Of course it was sunny. It never rains in Southern California. You’ve got a choice of the 1990 song of that title or the 1972 song.
I expect this is a Discourse issue but your information would be more usable if the photos could be side-by-side e.g. grid with 3 columns (Sony, Librem 5, Open Camera), and a row for each photo subject. Don’t suppose you have a web site somewhere where you could put it all up and then link to it?
My overall impression: There’s still some work to be done.
Yep, Discourse limitations. But you can copy the images into a spreadsheet, for instance, side by side, for yourself.
It’s a bit disappointing that the conditions were sub-optimal for viewing the L5’s screen and taking my time with the settings. If not for that, these outdoor images would have been better. So no one should think Millipixels can’t make decent photographs, albeit through a somewhat laborious process right now.
Mostly seems to confirm what I assumed about the L5 camera though: Good sensor but lacking software features such as autofocus and some kind of WDR with different apertures/shutter speeds/iso. The photos are blurry even when manually setting the focus since it’s hard to see on a small screen, and photos with a wide range of brightness often lack details in the brightest and/or darkest parts of the photo. I’m no photography expert though, so someone else can correct me if my assumptions are wrong.
Edit: The colors are pretty strange on a few of the photos as well, have no idea whats going on there.
It’s mostly because I couldn’t see what I was doing in such bright light; my vision is slightly blurred to start with, and the glare all around me, as well as on the screen and especially through the viewfinder made it hard to judge any setting well, even with the phone’s brightness set to max. Because of those things, I didn’t put a lot of effort into getting things just right. (I was also in a rush, as I wanted to avoid capturing people walking into my field of view.)
In the shade or indoors, it’s easier to achieve good shots, I think.
One thing that’s disappointing right now is that landscape orientation isn’t usable. Switching to landscape makes the image in the viewfinder shrink to about 1/4 size and flips it 90 degrees to the right! Plus, the keyboard pops up, obscuring a large part of the screen.
And another complication is that the settings sliders don’t adjust continuously in real time. There’s a slight delay after every adjustment, so it’s really trial and error.
Probably white balance not matching the actual lightning. The camera app only offers a couple of presets, you’d have to develop the raw picture manually to make it better.
(also, the color calibration matrix we use is rather rough at the moment, we still need to collect proper sensor calibration data)
Yes. Still, you can see from @dos’s post that you can join the images into a single image in order to make them appear side-by-side. I believe you can do that with GIMP. I suspect you can do that from the command line using the imagemagick package.
Copy all images from 3 separate folders to one folder, taking care to rename each image so that I could tell which camera app they came from and which montage they belonged in (s1.jpg, m1.jpg, o1.jpg, etc.).
Due to unexpected orientation issues in the montage process, open each image produced by the Sony and Open Camera apps, rotate image, save, rotate image back, save again. (I first tried to use the -rotate (degrees) parameter with montage, but that was a bit problematic.)
Copy each saved montage (montage1.png, montage2.png, etc.) to Libre Writer, then copy from there to this thread, replacing all the old images and reworking the text.
My photos on my new Librem 5 (which I’ve had for less than a week) end up like the above. For each photo there’s a DNG file which when displayed by gwenview on my PC looks the same as the JPG. All the photos look darker than expected and appear to be rendered in VGA 16 color mode or something. I’m using the default camera app with default settings.
Also as an aside the microphone seems to have an unreasonably low volume, just mentioning this in case it’s related.
Welcome, @etbe!
Low-light indoors shots need a bit of adjustment, in my experience. The app is just a preview at the moment, but they’re working constantly to improve it.
EDIT: By the way, is your L5 on amber repo, or byzantium? Byzantium brought in a LOT of improvements to everything.
Looks like you took that photo at a way too low gain/exposure setting, which in turn limited the dynamic range of the picture so much that it introduced visible banding when scaled back up to full brightness range by dcraw. You absolutely need to crank them up for most indoor photos to make any sense at all.
I recommend reading this blog post for context and details:
amarok: It’s on Byzantium, I only recently got it and it was on Byzantium, then I had to reflash it again on Byzantium.
dos: Thanks for that reference. My main takeaway is that I should just not bother using the camera at this time, photography isn’t my thing so I’ll use another device for photos, I just want to click and have it just work. But learning about the science of digital photography is interesting.
I’ve applied for access to the community wiki, I’ll add something about this to it. The community wiki seems pretty bare at the moment.
You’ve got a choice of the 1990 song of that title or the 1972 song.
